A Second Korean War?

Honestly, how many times in your life have you ever run across a headline like
this:
“Top general says he would resist ‘illegal’ nuke order from
Trump”? That was Air Force General John Hyten, head of the U.S. Strategic
Command, the present commander of American nuclear forces, speaking at a conference
in Canada last November. I mean, this has assumedly been an issue with every
recent president for whom the nuclear “football,”
aka “button”
– actually a relatively mundane briefcase – was always on hand. Any of them
had the singular ability to order the American nuclear arsenal into play (a
deeply inappropriate word for what would follow but in the spirit of “football”).

We’ve just taken a step
or two back from a potential fire-and-fury
moment on the Korean peninsula, with most eyes focused on North Korea. There,
a strange autocrat with a bizarre hairdo has been bragging about the nuclear
“button”
on his desk, while overseeing his country’s testing of long-range missiles and
what may have been its first hydrogen
bomb. It’s the sort of thing that could leave anyone edgy. And
if that makes you nervous, consider this: on the other side of the planet, a
strange figure with autocratic tendencies and a bizarre
hairdo, a “very
stable genius,” has been bragging about his own “button”
and, unlike the North Koreans, we know that the nukes in his arsenal are quite
capable of hitting their targets.

Worse yet, as the Guardianreported
recently, that arsenal, already the biggest on the planet, is about to be made
significantly more “usable” in the age of Trump. His administration’s
upcoming Nuclear Posture Review, the first in eight years, will reportedly lift
constraints on the kinds of situations (including non-nuclear
ones) in which American nuclear weapons might be used, while focusing on producing
a new, low-yield, more “usable” warhead and other so-called tactical
nukes. This is frightening stuff for an arsenal already undergoing
a 30-year, possibly $1.7
trillion upgrade. Mind you, the saddest story of all is that while
The Donald has openly exhibited a strange fascination with nukes and their power
to destroy, he’s otherwise been in remarkably good company. After
all, our last president – you know, the one who gave that 2009
speech about a “world without nuclear weapons” and got the Nobel
Prize for his abolitionist stand – somehow managed to oversee the launching
of that 30-year nuclear “modernization” program before leaving office.

So, yes, worry about North Korea and its unnerving leader. But worry more about
whether General Hyten would really find an order to use nukes “illegal”
and resist it. And while you’re at it, join TomDispatch
regular Rajan Menon in considering the most anxiety-producing place on the
planet right now, that focus of tweet storms (and possibly storms of a far more
consequential kind), the Korean peninsula. ~ Tom

Avoiding Armageddon in KoreaOr Launching a War for the AgesBy Rajan Menon

Most people intuitively get it. An American preventive strike to wipe out
North Korea’s nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, or a commando raid
launched with the same goal in mind, is likely to initiate a chain of events
culminating in catastrophe. That would be true above all for the roughly
76 million Koreans living on either side of the Demilitarized
Zone. Donald Trump, though, seems unperturbed. His recent contribution
to defusing the crisis there: boasting
that his nuclear button is “bigger and more powerful” than that
of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

The president’s high school locker-room braggadocio provided rich material
for comedians and maybe for shrinks. Meanwhile, there remains the continuing
danger of a war in the Koreas, whether premeditated or triggered accidently
by a ship seized, an aircraft downed, a signal misread… you get the picture.
No serious person could dismiss this scenario, but even the experts
who track the evidence closely for a living differ on just how probable it
is. In part, that’s because, like everyone else, they must reckon
with a colossal wild card – and I’m not talking about Kim Jong-un.

The Pessimists

On one side are those who warn
that President Trump isn’t blowing smoke when he talks, or tweets, about
destroying North Korea’s nuclear warheads and missiles, the infrastructure
supporting them, and possibly even the whole country. By now, it’s
common knowledge that his national security officials – civilian and military
(the distinction having blurred in the Trump era) – have been crafting
plans to strike before that country’s nuclear arsenal becomes fully
operational.

No one who listened to PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff interviewing
National Security Adviser Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster just after the
Trump administration released its National
Security Strategy in December could simply dismiss the warnings as those
of so many Cassandras. McMaster dutifully summarized that document,
which included a pledge to “respond with overwhelming force to North
Korean aggression and improve options to compel denuclearization.” When
Woodruff then asked whether he believed war was becoming more likely by the
day, he agreed, adding that “the president has asked us to continue
to refine a military option, should we need to use it.”

Others who should be in the know have offered even scarier prognoses. During
an interview with ABC News on the last day of 2017, former chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen claimed
that, while McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis had stayed Trump’s
hand so far, their ability to continue to restrain such a “disruptive”
and “unpredictable” president was diminishing. “We’re
actually closer to nuclear war with North Korea and in that region,”
he concluded, “than we’ve ever been.”

Then there’s Trump himself. He has long since moved from saying,
as he did last May, that he would “be honored” to meet Kim Jong-un
“under the right circumstances” to warning,
in August, that if North Korea threatened the United States, it would “be
met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” In September,
he upped the ante again in a speech
to the U.N., declaring that he would “have no choice but to totally
destroy North Korea” if that were needed to defend the United States.

Left unspecified was Trump’s definition of “defend.”
Would additional North Korean nuclear and missile tests pose a sufficient
threat for him to order a preventive war? Was his red line a fully operational
North Korean nuclear force? Or did he mean that he would retaliate in
kind only if Pyongyang were to attack the United States, Japan, or South Korea
with nuclear weapons? If either the first or second scenario represents his
threshold, then Mullen’s dire assessment can’t be discounted as
hyperbole. If it’s the third, the world can breathe a bit easier for
now, since there’s no conceivable reason for Kim Jong-un to attack a
country with nuclear weapons, least of all the United States, except in response
to the potential destruction of his state.

In his latest
gyration, having failed to scare Kim into denuclearization, Trump has
welcomed talks between Seoul and Pyongyang that he had only recently discounted
and, predictably, taken credit for a turn of events that has sidelined him.
He even suggested that the United States could eventually join the negotiations,
meant in part to prevent a conflict during the February Winter Olympics in
Seoul, and reacted positively to the possibility that they might continue
even after the games end.

Of course, this president can turn on a dime, so such words mean next to
nothing and should offer no solace. After all, on two occasions he derided
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s efforts to defuse the crisis through
negotiations, declaring,
“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he’s
wasting his time trying to negotiate with little Rocket Man. Save your
energy, Rex, we’ll do what has to be done.”

The Optimists (Well, Sort of)

On the opposing side of the how-likely-is-war debate are the optimists, a
different coterie of journalists, ex-officials, and policy wonks. Their
basic point boils down to this: yes, Trump has made fire-and-brimstone statements
about North Korea, but chalk up the endless bombast to his problem with impulse
control and his desire to feed red meat to his base, while scaring Kim.

Unfortunately, you can’t put much stock in this take either – not
once you consider the accompanying caveats. Gideon Rachman, an Asia
specialist and Financial Times columnist, is typical of this crew
in concluding
that war on the Korean peninsula is unlikely – only to liken the current
atmosphere in Washington to the one that prevailed just before the 2003 Bush
administration invasion of Iraq. For good measure, he adds that Lindsey
Graham – super-hawk, Trump confidant (to the extent that anyone is), and
member of the Senate Armed Services Committee – believes that war is “inevitable.”
(This is optimism?) Rachman’s fallback suggestion is that Australia,
Japan, and South Korea won’t support a preventive strike on North Korea.
Now ask yourself this: How often does Donald Trump take others’
advice? When is the last time you heard him say “multilateralism”?

Jeffrey Lewis, a well-regarded expert on nuclear weapons, discounts
the likelihood of war for a different reason. He thinks Trump’s
bombast is so much bluster, designed to jangle Kim’s nerves and drive
the North Korean leader to relinquish his nuclear cache lest an out-of-control
American president vaporize his regime. Given what we now know about
the present occupant of the Oval Office, that might be a modestly convincing
thought if Lewis didn’t introduce his own qualifiers. He believes
Trump’s faith that China, in hopes of getting economic rewards from
the United States, will eventually persuade (or coerce) Kim to denuclearize
is misplaced because Beijing lacks the necessary clout in Pyongyang. Indeed,
Kim doesn’t trust China and has killed or sidelined those whom he suspects
of being pro-Chinese.

Lewis also lays out a range of possibilities, each of which could trigger
a spiral towardwar. These include North Korea shooting down
an American reconnaissance aircraft or sinking a South Korean naval vessel,
both of which, he reminds us, Pyongyang has done in the past (the first in
1969,
the second in 2010) – when
it still lacked nuclear weapons. So Lewis’s American-style optimism
doesn’t offer any more grounds for cheer than Rachman’s British
variant.

Where does this lack of consensus on the likelihood of war leave us? The
answer: no one can really assess the gravity of the danger, particularly because
the man who occupies the White House is arguably the most volatile president
we’ve ever had.

It’s no pleasure to quote former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
but when it comes to the probability of war in the Koreas, it’s hard
not to be overwhelmed by the “known
unknowns.”

What We Do Know

The inability to fathom just how close we may be to war there doesn’t
mean we know nothing about the Korean crisis that’s worth knowing.

We know that North Korea has long been committed to building nuclear weapons
and produced small quantities (six
to thirteen kilograms) of weapons-grade plutonium as early as 1992.

We know that North Korea withdrew
from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (which it joined in 1985) in 2003;
that it detonated its first nuclear weapon in 2006
during the rule of Kim Jong-il, the father of North Korea’s current
leader; and that it has conducted five
other tests since then in 2009, 2013, 2016 (twice), and 2017 – four of
them after Kim Jong-un took power in December 2011.

We know that North Korea has been no less dogged in building and testing
ballistic missiles, beginning in 1984,
and that the Hwasong-15, test-fired last November (with an apogee of 2,800
miles and an estimated range of 8,100 miles), has the capacity
to strike the continental United States. And Pyongyang has gone beyond
liquid-fuelled missiles (that require prolonged, telltale preparations to
launch), testing
solid-fueled variants, which can be fired at short notice.

We know that Pyongyang is close to producing, or has already produced, a
warhead that can be placed atop an intercontinental ballistic missile and
survive the heat and
stress encountered on reentering the earth’s atmosphere. In
other words, North Korea is without question effectivelya
nuclear weapons state, which means Kim Jong-un’s claim,
in his 2018 New Year’s Day speech, that he has a nuclear button on his
desk may not be an idle boast (even if no
literal button exists).

Finally, we know that American threats and military maneuvers on and around
the Korean peninsula, a series
of U.N. Security Council sanctions since 2006, and behind-the-scenes diplomacy
by China and Russia have not induced Pyongyang to change course, even though
China, in particular, recently imposed draconian limits on energy exports to that country, which could potentially cripple its struggling
economy.

The Denuclearization Fantasy

No one (outside of Pyongyang) could celebrate a nuclear-armed North Korea,
but no one could reasonably be surprised by it either. Nuclear weapons
have long served as a symbol of exclusivity for great powers and their regional
cohorts. It’s no accident that all the Security Council’s permanent
members are nuclear states. Having accorded such weaponry supreme prestige,
who could be shocked that other countries, even relatively small and poor
ones, would try to acquire them as well and refuse to be cowed by political
or economic pressure.

Despite various campaigns for nuclear disarmament, the current nuclear states
have not shown the slightest inclination to give them up; so the promise of
a nuclear-free world rings hollow and is unlikely to persuade states that
really want nukes not to build them. Beyond conferring status, these
weapons make attacking a country that has them dangerous indeed, providing
a de facto guarantee against regime change.

The North Koreans have made
this point more than once, citing the fates of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein
and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, each of whom gave up his country’s
nuclear program and then was taken down by the United States. The idea
that the leaders in Pyongyang are simply paranoid maniacs or can’t possibly
believe that they face such a threat from the United States (which already
fought one war on the Korean peninsula) is preposterous. If you were
Kim Jong-un, you’d probably build nuclear weapons.

The upshot: short of a war, there’s no chance of denuclearization.
That, in turn, means: were Trump and his generals to launch an attack on North
Korea’s nuclear arsenal and even a single warhead capable of striking
the United States survived, Pyongyang might well use it to retaliate.
According to the experts who engage in such grisly estimates, a 15-kiloton
nuclear weapon (equivalent to “Little Boy,” the atomic bomb the
U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945) that lands somewhere
in, say, Los Angeles would kill more than 100,000
people immediately and yet more thereafter. To put this in perspective,
bear in mind that the estimates
of the yield of the warhead North Korea tested last September run as high
as 250 kilotons. And don’t forget that, even if it couldn’t
effectively reach the United States, the North could still target either South
Korea or Japan, causing a devastating loss of lives and sending shockwaves
through the global economy.

And even if Kim couldn’t retaliate with nuclear weapons, he could still
order the thousands of artillery pieces his military has trained on the South
Korean capital, Seoul, to fire. The metropolis and its satellite towns
are home to nearly 25.5
million people, half of the country’s total population, so the death
toll would be enormous, even taking into account the limitations
of the North’s artillery. And given that some 28,500 American
troops and nearly
137,000 American civilians are based in South Korea, many close to the
border, Trump’s reported
remark to Lindsey Graham that, in the event of such a war, people will
“die over there” is not just callous in its disregard for Korean
lives, it’s ignorant. Even an American commando raid into North
Korea could trigger a wider war because the North Korean leadership might
reasonably regard it as a prelude to a larger attack.

The bottom line? Trump could fulfill his vow never to allow North Korea
to become a nuclear-armed power only by resorting to a preventive war, as
Pyongyang hasn’t been and is unlikely to be moved to disarm by sanctions
or other forms of pain. And a preventive war would be calamitous.

Stopping the War Machine

Here’s a prerequisite for avoiding war in Korea: stop believing in
the North’s denuclearization, attractive and desirable as it might be
(if achieved through diplomacy).

It doesn’t follow, however, that war can’t be avoided. Kim
Jong-un and his inner circle are not, in fact, irrational beings immune to
deterrence. Their paramount aim is to ensure the survival of the North
Korean state. Starting a nuclear war would destroy it. Yes, many people
have perished in North Korea (whether due to repression or famine), but deterrence
worked in the cases of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao
Zedong, both of whom enacted policies that killed millions. Mao supposedly
even boasted that China could survive a nuclear war because of its huge population.

Coming to terms with the reality of a nuclear-armed North Korea and trusting
in deterrence may not sound like a perfect ending, but under the circumstances
it’s undoubtedly the best way to avert catastrophe. And that,
unquestionably, is the urgent task. There are other ways, down the line,
to make the Korean peninsula a better place through dialogue between the two
Koreas, by drawing the North into the regional economy and reducing troops
and weaponry on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone. These shouldn’t
be ruled out as infeasible.

For them to happen, though, South Korea would have to separate itself from
Trump’s war plans by refusing to allow its sovereign space (land, sea,
and air) to be used for such a preventive war. The symbolism would be
important even if Trump could strike in other ways.

Seoul would also have to build on two recent positive developments that emerged
from a surprise January 9th meeting between the Koreas. The first is
the agreement
on Kim Jong-un’s proposal
(initially advanced by the South last June) to send a North Korean contingent
to the February Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. The second
flowed from South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s follow-up idea
of restoring the hotline between the countries and beginning discussions of
how to tamp down tensions on the peninsula. (Pyongyang shut down the
hotline in February 2016 after South Korea’s conservative government
closed the Kaesong joint industrial zone located in the North, which then
employed more than 50,000 North Koreans.) Moon’s suggestion doubtless
eased the way for the subsequent agreement to hold future military
talks aimed at reducing the risks of war.

There are further steps Seoul could take, including declaring a moratorium
on military exercises with the United States – not just, as
now (with Washington’s consent), during the February Olympics and
the Paralympics that follow and end in March, but without a preset time limit.
While such joint maneuvers don’t scare Pyongyang, moves like flying
American B1-B bombers and F-15C fighter jets in international airspace off
North Korea’s coast do ratchet up the tension. They increase the
chances of one side concluding that the other is about to attack.

Trump may continue his threats via Twitter and again denigrate the value
of negotiations with Pyongyang, but South Korea is a powerful country in its
own right. It has a $1.4 trillion economy, the 11th
largest in the world (versus North Korea’s paltry $32.4
billion one), and ranks sixth
in global exports. It also has a formidable
military and will spend $34
billion on defense in 2017 – more than North Korea’s entire gross
domestic product. It is, in short, anything but the Asian equivalent
of a banana republic for which Donald Trump should be able to write the script.

Trump’s generals and the rest of the American foreign policy establishment
won’t welcome independent initiatives by Seoul, typified by the condescending
remark
of a former official about the hazards of South Korea “running off the
leash.” Predictably, mainstream warnings
have already begun. Cunning Kim Jong-un wants to drive a “wedge”
between the United States and South Korea. He’s trying to undo
the sanctions. Agreeing to talks with Pyongyang will only communicate
weakness. The United States must demonstrate its resolve and protect
its credibility. And so it goes.

Policies based on these shibboleths, which portray South Korea as an American
dependency, have brought us to the brink of war. Continuing them could
push us over the edge.

Rajan Menon, a TomDispatch
regular, is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International
Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, and Senior Research
Fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace
Studies. He is the author, most recently, of The
Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.